The internet of things is a common phrase describing things being connected to the internet. And it is when i start summarizing the "internet of things" I own myself that i can see that we have come a way. I am thrilled to see so many dumb things being handed a "brain" to work for us human beings. In this post i will give you a short introduction to "My internet of things" and especially the IFTTT service i use to tie them all together.

The Cloud or local?

Several times i have found myself in discussions regarding having the brain or main controller of your internet connected devices on a "local" internet connected device rather than in the cloud. Now especially on the Fibaro forum i have asked several times about support for the IFTTT service. In my mind if anything is internet connected it should also have capabilities of processing in the cloud. I understand that we need a controller locally to make everything stable and also be able to control things like home automation even if your internet dropped out. But if the home controller was to control absolutely everything it would slow down and become useless. This is also the main difference between Smarthings which i have previously written about and Fibaro HC2 or Vera (Norwegian post). The Smarthings hub is only collecting local radio signals from various home automation appliances and pushing them to the cloud to do the processing, Fibaro's HC2 does all the processing in the central itself and can be programmed to send the result to the cloud. There are pro's and cons about both. In my mind the lather is the best, as long as it supports the cloud part!

What is IFTTT?

IFTTT is short for IF THIS THEN THAT.IFTTT was launched back in 2010 and has come quite some way after that. In the beginning the possibilities were not great, i joined the service quite early because it let me do something i was not able to do before and i saw the potential. IFTTT lets you create what they call recipes, every recipe has a trigger and and an action based on that trigger. An example of a recipe is: "If somebody tags me in a photo on Facebook, Then store that photo in my Dropbox account. The IF and THEN terms are commonly known to developers and coders, the amazing thing with IFTTT though is that they remove the need for in depth coding and make it possible for everyone to program advanced tasks.

In the beginning i was using the service for notifying me about new RSS feeds or simple e-mail notifications. Today the service brings us much more than that and is rapidly growing. They also started out as a web based service only, but recently have developed an app for both Android and iOS.

My if this then thats

I have activated 30 out of the 124 channels they have available today, so i still have a way to go. I am not going to list them all, but here are some of my favorites.

Android:The Android channel lets you do several things. Like using Android wear, Android location, Android SMS, Android Phone, Android Device, Android photos and Android notifications. So with this channel i am storing all incoming and outgoing SMS and phone calls in a Google Drive Spreadsheet. I am using my LG G Watch to trigger triggers and using my Android device to trigger triggers based on my location.

Pushover: This channel allows me to send notifications to all my devices. I have programmed my HC2 to send all notifications through the Pushover service. The IFTTT service allows me to push notifications from all this channels to all of my devices. An example of this is if my Nest Protect detects carbon dioxide it will notify me with a high priority alert on all my devices, this alert bypasses the phones volume setting forcing an audible alarm i have to accept before it stops. This feature is another reason why i am not only using Fibaro's own notification service.

Netatmo: Netatmo lets me send pushover notifications or give me a daily digest of the forcasted weater or live weather report of my devices. This can be if the oxygen level in the living room is to low or if the Netatmo rainsensor has detected rain outside.

Life360: This allows me to track my family members and allowing me to create triggers based on this. Now i must emphasise that this is not a function for tracking down my wife it is just an easier way of beeing able to Arm and disarm the alarm at home based on our location. So if i am the last family member leaving the house the alarm will activate. The first member to get back home will automatically disarm the alarm and let us all know we are home. I have set up Tasker for Android to arm and disarm the Alarm based on the pushover message that is coming through.

Flower Power: I just recently bought myself a couple Parrot Flower Power's. Theese track you plants health, indoors or outdoors. So if i have forgotten to water my plants i can have a notification sent to my phone, or even my wifes phone as she is the one doing it :)

Dash: A while back i bought a couple of OBDII Bluetooth adapters for my cars. Just recently i discovered this app. It allows me to add my cars to the app and it will log my trips and my drip details in the app. The IFTTT service enables me to recieve a notification everytime one of my cars have turned on or off the ignition or save details about the trip to a Google spreadsheet, Distance traveled, fuel consumption and so forth. Now this may seem strange but i know there are people out there that actually log this manually so there is one purpose of it the other is teeing it in with my home automation, making the garage door open or similar.

Summary

Now as you can see the potential for this service is quite substantial. It allows you to have your internet of things communicate and work for you. Now i must say that if Fibaro ever built support for this i will be very happy, and i am not alone. It is possible to integrate the two today but it is not easy. I am pretty sure that Fibaro or any other major smart home developer is never going to be able to integrate all these services in the same speed and great of ease as IFTTT is doing, so by creating an API and supporting the service they are going to broaden their client base. Smarthings and Belkin We-Mo have already jumped on the wagon so it is time for Fibaro to adapt as well. And if they do they will have a significant advantage to the two others as they are cloud based hubs. In general the possibility with the channels on IFTTT are endless, they allow you to automate just about everything. And i hope that in the years to come we will see more dumb things become smart, allowing me to get dumber.